A consumer machine may have a processor and memory and may run an operating system and applications. A storage provider may include storage devices, such as hard disk drive arrays. A consumer machine may communicate with a storage provider through I/O channels, such as Fibre Channel, Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), Serial Attached Small Computer System Interface (SAS), and the like. The consumer machine may construct and queue I/O requests. The consumer machine may also cache data from the storage provider to reduce access times of frequently used data. Handling I/O requests and data caching may consume resources of the consumer machine processor.